Suchergebnisse

This paper seeks to address the divide between political rhetoric and reality on the question of the impact of the Internet on China. Many politicians and pundits steadfastly promote the Internet as a conduit for democracy, without empirical proof to support their statements. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the debate over information technology and the Internet in China. The Chinese Communist Party is employing a number of approaches to control the Internet, from introducing numerous regulations to encouraging self-censorship, with some success. This paper will examine state-coordinated measures to control the use of the Internet, look at how the Internet could be making CCP rule more effective, and consider the validity of the argument that the Internet represents a threat to CCP rule. (J Contemp China/DÜI)

The role of the Comintern in the formation of the second Chinese Communist Party-Kuomintang (CCP-KMT) united front has long been the subject of debate. Scholars have long recognized that an understanding of Moscow's role during the pivotal year and a half prior to the Xian Incident, and especially of possible conflict between the Comintern and Mao Zedong over the issue of a united front with Chiang Kai-shek, was essential to an evaluation of subsequent CCP-Soviet relations. This article is a contribution to our understanding of this important problem.

This article combines political analysis with ethnographic fieldwork to theorise Communist party's construction of political allegiance and their persistence of power in the democratic context at a local village level in the state of Kerala in India. We provide an inaugural scholarly conceptualisation of an empirical phenomenon, known in Kerala popular parlance as 'party gramam' or the 'party village', as the focus of analysis. As we explain, a 'party village' is an administrative unit where a particular political party dominates not simply electorally but in all lived experience. We posit that the concept of 'party village' is of specific value in our understanding of various forms of current (Communist) politics. The original ascendancy of communism in the village (as in many regions of Kerala) during the twentieth century was due to its progressive ideological challenge to feudal structures of class and caste oppression. However, in democratic post-independence India, the overwhelming dominance of Communist Party in the 'party village' presents the paradox of a party with an egalitarian ideology having adapted to a persistent Hindu caste hierarchy. After situating our work within the conceptual problematisations of political party competition, and in conversation with wider communist studies literature, we provide a background to the politics of Kerala and explain the unique phenomenon of 'party villages' in Kerala. We then provide an insight into the social and economic structures of one such village, explaining the salience of these structures in relation to political allegiances. Next, we illustrate the paradox of continued caste hierarchies in a Communist Party village, and the multiple ways in which Hindu religion and caste structures are important to performing individual identity in social settings. We dissect the various means through which the grassroots Communist Party apparatus in the village maintains its dominance by adapting itself to regressive caste hierarchies for political profit at the same time as laying claim to having challenged them. In our concluding section, we place our village observations in the longer frame of historical north Kerala village politics, noting the changes over time and offering theoretical perspectives upon them. In this sense, through a mix of empirical observation with historical context and theorisation, we highlight the importance and the implications of unconventional democratic dynamics more generally.

Discusses the WFP, formed in 1998 by New York State labor and community activists concerned by the Democratic Party's shift to the Right, its efforts to build a racially and sexually diverse coalition of workers, progressive elements within the Democratic Party, and grassroots organizations, and its strategy in the Nov. 2000 state elections. The WFP's priority to end Republican control of the New York State Senate and its activities in local elections.